https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29657343
Street Fighter II paper trails – allocating sprite space by hand (December 23, 2021 — 554 points, 76 comments)
That's interesting that I never noticed the slight differences in color on the teeth given their restrictions.
Also... Ken is wearing a Gi, not a Kimono. Kimono does literally mean "thing to wear", but a Gi is the training clothes pictured in Ken's model.
I very much enjoyed his Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D & Doom.
Seems unlikely. Managing the "physical" layout of sprites on a sheet is a lot of work; there's no reason to do that if it's going to be thrown out by an optimizer in the end.
Besides, notice that, on the optimized SF2 sheet, all of the tiles for one sprite get written out in order; they aren't interleaved left-to-right like the tiles would have been on a sheet.
I could see artists might still use a grid when sketching and planning to keep a handle on sprite size / memory usage. But not in the hand packed sort of way, more just each sprite drawn unscrambled on a grid. You wouldn't go through all the rigmarole of hand optimising memory layouts if some stage in the build system is going to ignore it and do its own thing instead.
So amazing to see a bit of street fighter history and funny I'd never noticed Ken's jaundiced eyes and teeth!
I am fortunate enough to have a live-in music studio, and it actually lives attached to the secondary monitor in the studio for us to take breaks on and do a few fights to decompress. Pretty much never fails to be a hit.
https://github.com/finalburnneo/FBNeo/releases
https://archive.org/download/2020_01_06_fbn/roms/arcade.zip/...
I only briefly had a Saturn and Virtua Cop series is still one of my most intense memories. A light gun game at home with graphics that looked like the arcade to my childhood eyes!
I wonder if kids these days will look back on the ps5 similarly hard to imagine!
But they have to be doing something (other than data compression), right? Otherwise we'd be seeing 500GB downloads?
In today's world, the GPU largely deals with textures, but the same rule holds — it can make sense to compute values rather than doing texture fetches. Anyway, I'd say your instinct is right — developers are still using lots of tricks to get things where they are. There is still a lot of competitive pressure to provide more, more, more and squeeze the most out of the hardware.
All that said, the 100GB download is often going to be audio/video. Then probably textures. There is certainly standard compression going on for a lot of that. But not the sort of manual "these texels go here, those texels go there" fiddling of data like described in this article. Though UV unwrapping is still and art and a science (:
My understanding is that for the biggest games there's an intentional tradeoff to use more storage in exchange for faster load times, although the need for that has apparently lessened over time. If you go back and look at some of the big multi-disc games of the late '90s/early '00s you might be shocked by how much duplication there was in order to reduce the need for disc swapping. (You might also be shocked by how much of that disc space was required solely to support pre-rendered cutscenes.)
I imagine when the HDD-era engines are end-of-lined we'll get a slight shrink, but it'll probably be eclipsed by the growing number of high resolution assets pretty quickly.